Lowest Race Car Ever

We mustn't forget, of course, that piloting an aircraft from a prone position is rather different from controlling a car from a similar position. 'Planes bank during cornering, like motorcycles, and so few lateral forces are felt by the pllot.

To race a car, driving truely prone, would require the driver to have considerable lateral restraints against cornering forces, or very strong arms and legs !

After looking at it at the racing car show, the Ford racing sports car(A3CL?) of 68 looks pretty low. but for an enclosed sports car, surely the original Shadow CanAm car has to be a contender

I quite agree, which is why I posted a link to this photo of the Shadow Can-Am although this with the large rear wing and radiators in the breeze doesn't look nearly as low as the original in the press roll out.

I quite agree, which is why I posted a link to this photo of the Shadow Can-Am although this with the large rear wing and radiators in the breeze doesn't look nearly as low as the original in the press roll out.

I quite agree, which is why I posted a link to this photo of the Shadow Can-Am although this with the large rear wing and radiators in the breeze doesn't look nearly as low as the original in the press roll out.

I quite agree, which is why I posted a link to this photo of the Shadow Can-Am although this with the large rear wing and radiators in the breeze doesn't look nearly as low as the original in the press roll out.

The driver is also sitting much higher than in the roll-out model - presumably to make the car easier to drive - but it does leave him awfully exposed. George Follmer and Vic Elford were very brave men!

The shots from the redish car are from the testing period back in the day.The black car was a replica of the original concept build by Shadow for the Rosso-Bianco Collection.I stood beside the black car and I can tell you its body is about 22 inches high. What adds up is the air intake manifold and the roll-over bar.

The whole project failed for more or less one very easy reason: small wheels! 10" in the front and 12" for the rear.You can reduce the height of a car to a point. When you have to start reducing the wheel diameter you will run into problems.

The Chaparral 2H was also a very low car. Does anybody have its dimensions?

Working from memory, the weird ducting in the back was designed to steer flow around from the flanks through radiators to reduce frontal area and clean up the front of the car. Obviously didn't work. The subsequent iteration of the design, which you can see in my post above had the rads crudely kludged in under the tacked on rear wing. The consequences of obstructing flow on the low pressure side of an airfoil apparently weren't widely understood by car people then. Or they just had no better place to put them.

Thanks for those shots of the testing Duc-Man, I hadn't seen those before. It was really quite an elegant and striking if flawed design in its original guise. Might have worked better as an 8-wheeler?